Hit Man | The Watchers

Two films offer very different approaches to their stories about performance and facade.

Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in Hit Man. Image courtesy of Netflix.

Hit men don’t exist, explains the title character of Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. As Gary (Glen Powell, radiating nuclear-grade charisma) points out, the cold-blooded professional killer who murders complete strangers for a living is a figment of the collective American imagination, shaped by pop culture more than by reality. Some people want to believe in the hit-man myth because they like to imagine themselves in that role: as ruthless, imperturbable, invulnerable to weakness or sentiment; as cold-blooded but also cool. Others want to believe the myth because they would love to purchase the services of such a person. Gary’s job is to help law enforcement arrest people in this latter group, and he does so by tapping into the fantasies that people in the former group share.

Gary doesn’t seek out this vocation at first. As an adjunct college professor so mild-mannered that he makes Clark Kent look like Ziggy Stardust, Gary prefers to manage the recording devices that the cops use to catch aspiring hit-man clients incriminating themselves on tape. A last-minute change of plan on one sting operation thrusts Gary into the fake hit-man role, though, and he discovers that he has a knack for pretending to be someone else. He’s so good at it that the police have him continue in the role for more stings. When he crosses paths with Madison (Adria Arjona), who meets with him to discuss the demise of her abusive husband, the spark between them leads Gary to talk her out of the hit and into embarking on a romance with him. The only catch is that Madison thinks Gary actually is a suave contract killer, and he enjoys the confidence boost he gets from dating her in that persona too much to tell her otherwise. Complications ensue.

This only-in-the-movies setup has a pleasing symmetry with Gary’s observation about contract killers existing only as Hollywood creations. Gary is literally living the dream, though he finds the membrane between fantasy and everyday life to be more permeable than expected. Linklater encourages us to share Gary’s exhilaration with the fantasy and his affable astonishment at the unexpected detours his life takes as it follows that fantasy. It doesn't hurt that Linklater’s playful screenplay (cowritten with Powell) is based on a true story but plays coy about just how much dramatic license it’s taking at any given moment.

Gary’s reality and fiction, and his performance and true self, have a way of bleeding together depending on how hard he commits to the bit. When he puts on makeup, applies temporary tattoos, and assumes a fake accent to play the part of a remorseless killer-for-hire, is he putting on a charade for his audience’s benefit or letting some dormant facet of his personality out to play? Is Madison attracted to Gary or to his alter ego? Does the distinction even matter? Powell plays his character’s many disguises for laughs (and gets them—his note-perfect performance captures both the hit-man caricatures and the pleasure that dorky Gary derives from LARPing them), but Linklater makes sure to cut away to the reactions of his law-enforcement colleagues, who are simultaneously awed and weirded out by his thespian prowess. Maybe Gary enjoys playing dress-up a bit too much.

The notes of ambivalence give Hit Man the air of a noir that is itself playing dress-up as a high-concept comedy. Linklater loves good vibes too much to lean into any genuine darkness, but enough shadows remain on the periphery of the action to make you wonder about the potential of a more straight-faced take. Arjona is the film’s secret weapon here; her performance exhibits a Stanwyck-like guile that keeps both the hero and the audience guessing. Her slipperiness does not fully gel with the film’s overall larkiness, but the resulting ambiguity is welcome. Linklater, always a savvy director when it comes to working with his cast, stays out of her way, even including a blink-and-miss-it reaction shot from her near the film’s end that invites speculation about just how trustworthy she’s been this entire time.

This slight mismatch ends up being Hit Man’s Achilles heel. After teasing viewers with ruminations on how (to paraphrase Vonnegut) we must be careful who we pretend to be, Linklater punts with an ending that wraps everything up into a too-tidy bow. Given that Powell’s “Gary” is based on a real person who didn’t get into half of the shenanigans we see onscreen, it’s understandable that Linklater pulls his final punch, but it is still vaguely unsatisfying. Viewers are left with two possible conclusions. One is that Linklater doesn’t fully appreciate the weight of the moral and philosophical darkness inherent in subsuming one’s identity fully into a fantasy person. The other is that Linklater, just like his hero, is perhaps a little too good at playing pretend. —Kevin McLenithan

★★★☆

Hit Man is playing in theaters and streaming on Netflix.

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The Watchers

Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feature debut, The Watchers, has a premise that will sound vaguely familiar to anyone who’s seen her father M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, Knock at the Cabin. Both films are about lost souls putting on a performance for an unknown audience; both make broadly sweeping statements about the human condition. In The Watchers, Mina (Dakota Fanning), a young American living in Ireland, runs away from some dark past into an even darker forest with a mysterious bunker nestled inside. There, she’ll have to confront uncomfortable truths about herself and humanity.

Before she reaches the bunker, we watch her preparing to go out: donning a long dark wig over her own blond hair, putting on an accent, claiming to be a dancer, pretending to be someone she isn’t to an audience of one interested man in a bar. Their conversation is vapid, a rote trading of fun facts (real or made-up, it doesn’t matter) about each other. The rest of the film follows suit, flirting with the idea of performance and identity without managing to say anything substantial about either.

The bunker setting looks like a stage, with a concrete floor, a few thick carpets, and a scattering of furniture oriented so the residents are always seated toward one side of the structure. This side of the bunker is dominated by a massive one-way glass wall: mirrored on the inside, transparent on the outside looking in, much like an interrogation room. The space evokes the “fourth wall” of a stage or the silver screen. Every night, the residents of the bunker present themselves in a line facing the mirrored glass, as though they are actors auditioning for an audience they cannot see. On Mina’s first night, she’s pushed a step closer to the glass toward a horrible sound from the outside, which the other bunker residents tell her is applause from the watchers, as though Mina is an ingenue making a brilliant stage debut.

The story would make for an interesting play: trap the audience in an intriguing location with the characters, then watch them probe the boundaries of what they can and cannot do, all the while sniping at each other. Unfortunately, The Watchers has little interest in its characters or even in its setting, choosing to skip over the realities of living in the bunker in favor of increasingly clunky spoken exposition. We never get a sense for how these characters have adapted to their strange way of life, nor how they arrived there. It’s as if they were dropped, fully formed, into the bunker to pose and whisper dire warnings—swiftly ignored, then forgotten—about the rules that govern the place. The movie cuts from scene to scene with little opportunity to rest in the strangeness of the situation, and it skips past its own intriguing scenario as if afraid it will fall apart under closer examination.

Fall apart it does. The rules governing this story are so thin that they break under a swift glance, and the movie is so focused on repeating the same simple point that we cannot help but go back and question everything else we’ve seen while waiting for the movie to give us something new. The worst part of living in the bunker seems to be the inability to escape; the lack of amenities like running water is glossed over completely. The only other inconvenience is the lack of entertainment. Mina finds a DVD of a Big Brother–style reality show, then watches it often enough to learn the lines of the participants on the screen. She could be playing a part in a reality show herself, the movie suggests, but it refuses to interrogate anything further than holding the TV episodes side by side with the bunker mirror, then waiting for the audience to notice the similarities.

The production design takes its cues from Anthropologie ads: the image of Dakota Fanning running through the woods with a massive gilded birdcage is striking, but the film lingers on it just long enough to leave us questioning the logistics. The bunker is populated with pretty people who have nice hair and artfully torn (but still clean) knitwear. If the film were more interested in its premise about performance and artifice, the cleanliness of the setting would be an intriguing wrinkle, but as it is, the film’s aesthetic is yet another distraction from the point it is ostensibly trying to make.

All of this would be forgivable if the movie were trying to say something substantial, or at least interesting, about its premise. There are a lot of potentially interesting threads here—the idea of performance for an unseen audience, the hunger for human connection even when you want to just push everyone else away, and the use of societal rules as a tool for manipulation—but the film is so tied up in chasing shiny objects that it fails to do anything other than touch on these themes. Instead, it trades in yet another tired metaphor for grieving and guilt. —Sarah Welch-Larson

★☆☆☆

The Watchers is in theaters now.